Book Review: Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

´One day, the mother was a mother, but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else´.

There is a lot of intellectual excitement when discovering a new literary revelation. Almost six months into 2022, out of many new books and authors I got to know, Rachel Yoder is my favorite so far. What exactly means having a ´favorite´ author? It is that writing mind shaking my intellectual comfort zone, forcing me to think the unthinkable. 

In Nightbitch, a female character called anonymously ´the mother´ develops suddenly feral features. There is the body hair, but also a taste for raw meat. Sometimes she is hunting bunnies. Her son, for whom she abandoned a relatively successful career in arts - ´I am spending my life in a dark room, she thought to herself. I am spending my most productive years in unproductive, supine waiting´ - will follow suit her example, although in a more mimetic manner. She, the mother, is the one who is the real bitch. She morphed in an animal who does not need to work or think about art. Much easier.

I´ve seen many comparison between the Nightbitch and Kafka´s Metamorphosis. I will not go too far with this and it shouldn´t actually happen. Indeed, in both cases there is a dramatic body transformation taking place, but the context is radically different. Maybe Cursed Bunny is a more appropriate comparison.

This level of animality is the physiological outburst of a projection: of how a quiet housewife - ´a mother in a small Midwestern town´ -, with a husband making much more than her, should comply to the society´s pressure. The society´s expectation of motherhood. There are other mothers too, also moulded according to the society´s expectations: a happy working mom, an entrepreneur mom. And the Nightbitch that with a Nietzschean energy will turn her life into an art installation.

Nightbitch has not only various philosophical layers about arts and its limits among others, but also developed a fine semantics and social critic. 

But what which prevails is the writing wrapping and the unlimited power of literary imagination. And I have only pure intellectual love for such achievements.

Rating: 5 stars